Recruitment and the human factor

Finding the right job in London is like walking along a really long tightrope. Whilst juggling. Thankfully there are agencies to offer support and guidance along the way. Whatever their reasons for helping, it works for me.

For employers, finding the right candidate for a position generally comes at a hefty price. So you can understand why companies are looking to use latest technologies to cut out the middle man. Last year recruitment accounted for a quarter of all online advertising, and brands continue to experiment with new technologies to gain direct access to potential candidates.

Last year a virtual recruitment fair was held on Second Life which was hailed as a success by the companies participating. Blogging has become quite important in attracting candidates, as have PPC campaigns and (some would say) Social Networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. 

I tried using Facebook to search for jobs and I found it confusing and unprofessional. However it's not a bad place for recruiters to advertise, as ads can be targeted towards the right candidate profiles. Having said that, most people I've asked aren't even aware of any advertising on facebook - a phenomenon known as 'banner blindness'. An innovative approach to advertising is needed for this kind of advertising to pay.

From my perspective recruitment agencies are in no danger of being ousted for now. They provide a valuable service to people like me, and it's in their interest to get it right for all parties. They connect the right people to the right jobs and it seems to work. 

It's certainly the right thing to do for companies to divert their ad spend from offline to online. And there is a great deal of untapped potential for recruiting using new media methods. But the loss of recruitment agencies would mean a loss of the human factor, and isn't that what the recruitment industry is all about?

Video CV's - a novel approach, but not always the right one.

Writing for the web? Suppress your ego!

I spent today at an excellent course ran by the Neilson Norman Group, the web usability experts. Before the course I believed that I wasn't half bad at web copywriting. I don't use UPPER CASE, I don't centre align, I put keywords in bold (sometimes) and I never put a hyperlink from click here (as oppose to meaningful text).

Not that simple.

There are principles to writing content for the web, the most important of which is this:

Keep it short.

Why? Because people don't read the text on websites the same way that they'd read a book or a newspaper. They scan it. Research proves it. People visit websites for the purposes of research, not entertainment. So make it easy for them to find what they want. How?

Short paragraphs, short sentences and short words.

If you're a website owner, here's what to do to make a start today:

1. Get the metrics - find out the most visited page on your website (ask your web agency if you're not sure).

2. Reduce the number of words on that page by 50% - bullet points or a table might help you get your message across more succinctly.

3. Split the content into short 'chunks' with meaningful headings.

Writing for the web is not a chance to show off. It's not about big words, cheeky headlines and artistic licence. Like all things to do with website usability, it is about the audience and giving them what they are looking for. Get that right and you'll find that you've probably ticked a fair few the SEO and accessibility boxes as well.

Google tip: Why it's useful to search your own website URL

Google has a few tricks up its sleeve to help you see how your website is doing. In the Google searchbar there are a number of operators you can use to bring up information on your website.

Firstly, if you type in site:www.yourdomain.com, Google will bring up every single page within your site that has been trawled and indexed. If it brings up no records, then your URL has not been indexed and needs to be submitted. To do this, go to: http://www.google.com/addurl/. You can also use the [site:] command to find particular pages of your website. For instance, type into the searchbar SEO site:www.webreality.co.uk and Google will find the page(s) within the webreality site that contain information on search engine optimisation (SEO).



One of our clients the other day had inadvertantly managed to delete a section of their website. Rather than rolling back the database we were able to retrieve the content of that page by using the [cache:] command. The query [cache:] will show the version of the web page that Google has in its cache, in other words the last snapshot that was taken during the trawl.

Another useful operator is the [link:] command which will bring up all of the webpages linking to your website. Inbound hyperlinks are effective in improving your search engine rankings, especially if the link comes from meaningful keywords.

But remember, when it comes to search engines, content is a key factor in maintaining and improving upon rankings. To keep the search engines trawling it is important to make sure you update your site regularly with meaningful and useful copy.

Sock-Puppet Marketing and Bad Karma

It seems as though people are cottoning on to the power of cyberspace marketing. But before you start throwing your money at Google or any agency that claims to know the ins and outs of e-marketing, it's worth knowing what to watch out for.

I recently learnt about 'sock-puppet marketing' which is a means of promoting yourself by way of fake online identities. Software writer, Will Shipley recently observed a number of suspicious instances of 'private' postings on the web that look like endorsements of products and services but which have actually been planted by the manufacturers themselves. The use of virtual identities, also known as 'avatars' is completely legal and currently there is no way of policing it.

Morally it seems a bit wrong to me that through dissing your competitors, and praising your own products you can drive traffic to your site and increase ratings. Such is the power of the web. The fact of the matter is that anyone can play that game. Anyone is entitled to have their say, and if its on the web, then equally anyone can read it. What goes around comes around. So it's worth checking up on your online reputation - it's easy and cheap to set up regular searches for your brand within blogs, forums and general search engines, and that way you can head off any bad press at the pass.

In my opinion sock-puppet marketing is a futile marketing exercise - the more it is used, the less trustworthy it becomes. And if a company requires to stoop to such levels to win business then surely their reputation is beyond repair in any case.

Meta tags - What are they and should you care?

The meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. It is embedded into the html so you wouldn't be able to tell a site which uses meta tags apart from one that doesn't. But there's much dispute over whether search engines recognise them at all. The truth is that good content is more likely to help you with your search engine visibility than fancy tags.

A meta tag looks something like this:
meta name="description" content="a description of your page" OR
meta name="keywords" content="a, list, of, keywords"
and it does not need a closing tag. The use of the tag has in the past resulted in some web site owners abusing it in the hope of tricking the search engines into driving traffic to their site. However, that was about 10 years ago and since then search engines have become a lot more sophisticated in their crawling mechanisms.

It is true that, for certain search engines, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. Correct meta tags won't help you in optimizing for Google, but misleading meta tags could cause your site to be penalized.

From reading other peoples opinions, it seems that although meta tags are not given much importance by search engines, title tags and meta description tags are still considered to be very effective tools for increasing clickthrough rate. It appears as though no-one's really certain about meta tags but generally people are still of the opinion that, providing the content and keywords are relevant, it is still worth doing. In short, meta tags aren't quite dead yet.

Getting Google to Notice You

Almost 23 million people in the UK visited a search engine in January 2006 = 84% of the Internet population. The UK Internet population alone clicks on over half a billion links on search engines every month (click-throughs). Google continues its dominance of the search market generating nearly two-thirds (64%) of all click-throughs and almost 19 million visitors each month - three times as many as nearest rivals Yahoo! and MSN Search

Sometimes I think about those google geeks and how much trouble they cause me. We launched a site for a client last week and the very next day the client phoned and demanded to know why they weren't top on Google yet. I had to explain that it does take time - maybe even months for Google to send its little crawlers around the website, but I assured the client that they'd get a very good ranking eventually. The reason I'm sure of this is that I know we build our sites to W3C standards which means our html is very clean and tidy. That makes it much easier for the crawlers to analyse the webpage content.

Another reason I am confident this site will rank well is that they have spent a great deal of time inputting relevant content which accurately descibes their topic. And lastly they have lots of their manufacturers hyperlinking to their website, which effectively means they are getting votes so they must be important.

The good thing about Google is that there is no human involvement, which means it is a genuine source of objective information. That is unless there's money involved, such as the pay-per-clickthrough feature (Google Adwords), but I'll save that for another day.